Travel NAS 2024#

Last year I made up my mind to move away from Austin and sell all of my belongings, though I swear I’m not a minimalist. This included my homelab. However I still wanted to keep my data with me and ruled out cloud storage or a simple portable hard drive. I wanted a portable NAS for resilliency and I’ve grown to like TrueNAS.

I searched for weeks for a NAS I could buy that had the following features:

2.5 GbE ethernet
Eight 2.5” drive bays
Ability to plug in a 3.5” drive for backing up
Run TrueNAS instead of a propriatery OS or propriatery filesystem
Worldwide power support

I looked at different NAS offerings of different brands but none had all of the features I was looking for so I decided to build a custom travel NAS. The plan was to build a NAS that I could pack in a suitcase, with 2.5 GbE ethernet and 8 2.5” drives.

Items Used#

GMKtec G3 Barebone
ICY DOCK 8x2.5 SATA MB998SP-B
Flex ATX Power Supply 300W I had laying around
8 Port Non-RAID M.2 SATA Adapter
Kingston 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 Non-ECC KVR32S22D8/32
KingSpec 128GB 2242 SATA III 6Gbps M.2 SSD as the OS drive
LONRIONSAS Mini SAS SFF-8087 Right Angle to 4x SATA
Heatsinks 9mmx9mmx12mm for additional cooling
AURGA Viewer in case I need to recover/reinstall TrueNAS
Seven 4TB SSDs bought used on eBay

Custom Lid#

While the M.2 SATA adapter works fine with the G3, and all 8 disks show up on TrueNAS with proper serial numbers, the connectors protrude too much for the original lid to be used. An even bigger problem is with the M.2 adapter: it’s flimsy and the form factor is not designed for the forces used when plugging in and unplugging the SFF-8087 cables. The instructions that came with the M.2 adapter state that you should remove the adapter from the PC before attempting to plug or unplug any cable. This works fine if you don’t mind running the mini PC without a lid.

However I wanted to be able to easily and quickly plug and unplig the SFF cables. I designed a custom lid and support bracket to hold the SATA adapter in place with zero flexing. Great success!

Download models:

Prusa Printables: https://www.printables.com/model/810969-gmktec-g3-sff-sata-lid
Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6539226
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1bi8ad4/custom_lid_for_my_gmktec_g3_mini_pc_with_8_sata/

Performance#

When I posted this project in the TrueNAS subreddit a lot of commenters said the chipset on the SATA adapter has poor performance and reliability. For for my single-client use case I don’t have many performance issues. When I’m at 90% capacity and try to do multiple simultaneous writes over 2.5 GbE ethernet I do run into big performance hits, but 99% of the time I get really good throughput. Actually I think most of the problems are caused by me using a WD Blue SSD.

They also said the chipsets die randomly after some time. So far after months of use everything works fine. I did add little heatsinks to the chips on the SATA adapter just in case issues are caused by overheating.